"Oren." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and shook my hand, and his hand was warm and dry and had a rough place along the side of the index finger. "So who's Torben?"
I thought about lying. I thought about saying Torben was a coworker, or an ex, or a dog. But there is something about a Santa line that makes lying feel cheap, like swearing in church. A little girl in front of us was explaining to her father, very seriously, that she was going to ask for a horse and a second horse in case the first horse got lonely. A baby somewhere behind us was singing one long note. The loudspeakers were playing a Mariah Carey song I have heard so many times I no longer hear it so much as experience it, like weather.
"My brother," I said. "We don't really talk."
"Ah," Oren said, as though that explained everything, which in a way it did. He did not ask anything else. He just ate a pretzel bite and waited, and I have since learned that this is what he does, at work and everywhere else. He waits. He told me later that half of what he does all night is stand beside people who cannot breathe and wait with them until they can, and that if you rush a person who cannot breathe they only breathe worse.
"It's a chess piece," I said. "In the box."
"A chess piece."
"A knight. The white knight." I turned the little box over in my hand. "When I was ten and he was fourteen, we got into a fight on the dock at my parents' place on Lake Coeur d'Alene, and I took the white knight out of my grandfather's chess set, which was the one thing in the world my brother loved more than anything, and I threw it into the lake."
Oren winced. "How far?"
"Far. I was a pitcher in Little League. I had an arm."
"What was the fight about?"
"I have no idea," I said. "That's the worst part. I've tried for years to remember. I think he wouldn't let me use the canoe. Or he called me a name. I don't remember. I remember the knight going into the water. I remember the sound it made, which was nothing. It was so small it didn't even splash." I could feel my face getting hot, which was absurd; it was twenty-four years ago. "He dove for it for two days. In June. That lake is fed by snowmelt. He was blue. My mother made him stop."
"And he never replaced it."
"He used a lug nut," I said. "From my dad's truck. For twenty-four years. Every Christmas Eve he and my dad play one game on that board, it's a whole tradition, and the white knight is a lug nut. Nobody ever says anything about it. It's just there. It's like a little rusty monument to the worst thing I ever did."